Welcome to The Big Picture, where CULTURED’s critics zoom out for a wider view of the art world. While reviews remain the focus of The Critics’ Table, this space is reserved for longer reflections—treatises, prognostications, diaries, and meanderings. Really, anything goes. For this second installment, Co-Chief Art Critic John Vincler sifts through the messes of the current New York scene.
At the Whitney, “Edges of Ailey” crowds 18,000 square feet of gallery space with objects across media, from paintings and sculptures by other artists, to Alvin Ailey’s own archival notebooks, as 18 screens of moving-mage work loom over the exhibition. The show moves between cacophony and rhythmic polyphony, turning the multitudes into a chorus. Over in Kings County, “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” similarly invites chaos with its more than two-hundred contributors at the Brooklyn Museum. Amid the mind-spinning eclecticism of Thomas Schütte’s MoMA retrospective, visitors confront, in Lager (Storage), 1978, numerous painted panels, leaning casually against a wall. And in the kindred Mohr's Life, 1988, Schütte enlists a drying rack hung with numerous colorful socks.
The teeming, the too much, the disposably commonplace, and outright trash—mess seems to be the go-to riposte for what, often in today's New York gallery scene, feels like a retreat into pretty, clean, and conservative work. But not everyone can make disarray sing.
